When I was about twelve or thirteen, I met a girl at Korean Culture Camp whose adoptive parents had opted to keep her Korean first name, instead of giving her an 'American' name. At the time, I remember being somewhat jealous of her, and asking my parents about what the process would be for changing my name.
The issue of ambivalence towards names is something that I think a lot of adoptees have dealt with at one point or another. Some adoptees don't know their birth family name and were never given a first name. Others might know their birth family name, but have no first name. Others, like myself, have a birth name, and an adopted name. Names are certainly an essential part of our identities, they give us both a sense of belonging (family name) and a sense of uniqueness (given name), and for adoptees, realizing that we either never had a name or were given a new one without our consent is definitely not the easiest realization to come to.
My first name is Julia. My Korean given name is Jee Sun. The names aren't similar, but I like the fact that the first letter is the same. My middle name is both my Korean family name, and the middle name that my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother share. My last names are Italian (father's) and German (mother's).
I think at certain points in time, I definitely looked down on the hybridity of my name as a whole. When my personal interests turned towards Korean culture and history, I started to feel like my Korean name was my real name, and the one I had been given as an adoptee was false.
But here's what I've learned over time. Hybridity isn't a bad thing. I've come to appreciate how my name weaves in so many aspects of my identity, connecting to both my birth family and my adoptive family at the same time, reflecting the fact that, even though I came in from the 'outside,' I am just as much a part of the family as those who are born into it.
By the same token, when I started studying Chinese in college, I had to choose a Chinese name to be called by. Instead of asking my professor to pick out characters that fit attributes I thought represented me, I asked her to help me find the characters that my Korean name had come from. A bit of research revealed these characters without much trouble, and after five years of studying Mandarin, including stints in mainland China and Taiwan, the name Zhi Shan is as much a part of my identity as Julia. I like the fact that it represents and recognizes both my Korean heritage AND my experiences living in China and Taiwan.
And as an added bonus, my name, Julia, is also a fairly common Latin American name. So when I started playing soccer with a Mexican team, my teammates called me Julia, only with the Spanish pronunciation of the 'j' as an 'h.' I think it's incredibly fitting that my 'adopted' name crosses cultures, and more specifically, fits perfectly into a culture and language that I have come to hold very close to me.
In the same vein as my post on Korean identity a little while back, I feel like my Korean name is one part of me, one part of the name that I want to call myself by, but I don't see it as my only name, or my 'real' name. I wouldn't change my name back to my Korean name because it wouldn't reflect who I am. My identity is a multi-faceted thing, and I'm glad that my name reflects that.
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